Seed

In my post recently titled Does VC Fund Differentiation Matter? several people commented on some variation of “people” as the key to everything. I don’t view people as differentiation. I view them as the price of admission. Amy just walked by, read this over my shoulder, and said: “I don’t know what that means.” Hopefully, by the end of this post, it’ll be clearer … Yesterday I talked to several VCs or entrepreneurs considering becoming a VC. I didn’t know any of them – these were random intros from different people that I knew. I didn’t have an agenda for each call. I was just curious and felt like meeting a few new people yesterday. ...

I’ve met and emailed with many pre-seed and seed GPs in the past year. Over sushi last night with two of them, who are also long-time friends, one of them asked me “Brad, how do you think we are differentiated?” This generated a rant from me that went something like this. There are over 500 seed funds in the market right now. Maybe there’s a thousand. Many of them are angels raising a VC fund. Others are entrepreneurs / operators raising a VC fund. A few are existing VCs who are starting a new firm. I don’t even know what differentiation means anymore as it all blurs together. The operators say we know how to run businesses and help the CEOs that way. The angels say look at the deals we’ve done and the networks we have. Everyone describes the expertise they have around whatever the current hot new technologies are. Regional funds are trendy again. Differentiation is bullshit at this point – the only thing that matters is strategy and returns. And many of these funds / GPs have no realized returns, so all that really matters is strategy. ...

After two years of a dedicated experiment, we’ve decided to stop making new investments via our FG Angels Syndicate. We’ve learned a lot, achieved some of our goals, but ultimately have decided that the effort required to maintain our investment pace on AngelList is too great for us, at least for now. More on that in a bit, but let’s start with some history. The Monday after AngelList announced their Syndicate product in September 2013 we decided to to jump in with both feet and start FG Angels . As a result, we were one of the very first syndicates and the first VC firm to create a syndicate. ...

I got the following question from a friend yesterday. “I’ve had a few conversations recently about how individual seed investors are getting kind of tapped out – for a variety of reasons, but in general it’s not that easy to find people who are still actively investing. I don’t recall your having blogged about this – are you seeing it too? Lots of talk about Series A crunch but maybe there is a seed crunch too?” ...

Six weeks ago I wrote a post titled The Silliness Of Recapping Seed Rounds . I described a situation that occurred in one of our FG Angels investments that I thought was short sighted on the part of the VC involved and the CEO of the company. I characterized the situation as “silly” and specifically didn’t call out the people as my goal was to be instructive around the startup landscape, not to complain (we are big boys and will deal with whatever) or to try to generate a different outcome. I accepted what happened, wrote my post, and moved on. ...

Here’s the scenario. A company raises $2m of seed money from angels in a convertible note with a $6m cap. Assuming equity is raised at or above that cap, the total dilution, before the new money, is 33% (equivalent to an equity financing of $2m at a $6m post money valuation. The company spends the $2m building and launching their first product. The first release is underwhelming, but they iterate aggressively, with feedback and support from some of their angel investors. The product gets a lot better. They go out to raise a Series A, but there are no takers. The feedback is “come back when you’ve made more progress with customers.” They are running out of money. ...

This morning my partners at Foundry Group and I announced that we are going to make 50 seed investments of $50,000 each on AngelList between now and the end of 2014 . We’ll be doing this via AngelList’s new Syndicate approach through an entity called FG Angel where we will create a syndicate of up to $500,000, allowing others to invest $450,000 alongside anything we do. For now, we are using my AngelList account (bfeld) which I’ve renamed Brad Feld (FG Angel). We are working with Naval and team at AngelList to get this set up correctly so that a firm (e.g. Foundry Group) can create the syndicate in the future, at which point we’ll move the activity over to there. ...

On Friday, I saw a tweet from Chris Sacca about super pro-rata rights that said “Seeing a lot of VCs cram super-prorata terms into deals. Feels uncool to me. Any good arguments for why it’s helpful to entrepreneurs?” I quickly responded to Chris on Twitter with “@sacca just say no to super prorata” and then opened up a WordPress window and scribbled some thoughts for a draft post on that that I was planning to put up Monday morning (now). ...

There have been a number of thoughtful “early warning sign” posts in the past few days including one from Fred Wilson (Storm Clouds ), one from Mark Suster (What Angel Investing & Florida Condos Have in Common ), and Roger Ehrenberg (Investing in a frenzied market ). The seed investing phenomenon of 2010 has been awesome to watch and participate in. The velocity of activity from individual angels, angel groups, seed VCs (the correct phrase for most of the “super angels” which have now raised actual funds), and even traditional VCs has been on a steep climb throughout the year. When the numbers are tallied up at the end of the year (I’m sure someone will do it – and it won’t be me) I expect there will be all kinds of new records set. ...

I was thinking more about my post from yesterday titled Addressing The VC Seed Investor Signaling Problem . There were a bunch of good comments that caused me to realize that I wrote the post from the perspective of a VC, not an entrepreneur. As I mulled the comments over, I realized something very specific. If a VC invests in a seed round but then doesn’t invest in the next round, there is a signaling problem, regardless of what the VC does with their investment. ...